Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogelbam here, what would we see if we peeked
Speaker 1: into your fridge carefully prepared meals for the week, plus
Speaker 1: ingredients to riff on? Or are we looking at more
Speaker 1: like takeout containers or a mess of condiments and nothing
Speaker 1: to put them on? Maybe something unrecognizably fuzzy or gozer
Speaker 1: No shame here aside from Mesopotamian gods. Some combination of
Speaker 1: the latter describes the fridge shelves belonging to many of us.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's a busy schedule stress or just undeveloped cooking skills,
Speaker 1: but it can be hard to make a home cooked
Speaker 1: dinner or breakfast or lunch, So frozen meals to the rescue.
Speaker 1: A freezing foods for eating later is nothing new. Humans
Speaker 1: have been doing that for millennia, but prepared frozen meals
Speaker 1: ready to be reheated and eaten didn't come around until
Speaker 1: technological innovations in the nineteen hundreds led to affordable refrigerators
Speaker 1: and quick freezing machines. No one person invented frozen convenience foods.
Speaker 1: It took a bunch of steps a few mishaps and
Speaker 1: some smart marketing. But let's step back from frozen meals
Speaker 1: to frozen foods period. The high quality frozen foods that
Speaker 1: retain their texture and flavor when reheated can be largely
Speaker 1: credited to one Clarence Bird's eye. Yes, that Bird's eye.
Speaker 1: He developed a system of packing and flash freezing fresh
Speaker 1: food back in the nineteen twenties. These two parts of
Speaker 1: the process, the packing and the flash freezing, are critical
Speaker 1: because you've got two main obstacles to food being appetizing
Speaker 1: once it's reheated. One is freezer burn, which happens when
Speaker 1: frozen foods are exposed to enough circulating air that ice
Speaker 1: crystals on the surface layer of the food evaporate, leaving
Speaker 1: a terrible little dry i pocket behind. The best way
Speaker 1: to prevent this is to seal food in air tight
Speaker 1: packaging with the surface tightly covered. The second obstacle to
Speaker 1: overcome is mushiness. This occurs because most things that we eat,
Speaker 1: alike meats and vegetables, contain a lot of water. When
Speaker 1: water freezes, it expands and forms ice crystals of increasing
Speaker 1: size that can break up cell walls within food, which
Speaker 1: means that food will be mushy when it's reheated. But
Speaker 1: if you freeze something very quickly, the size of the
Speaker 1: ice crystals that form will be small and hopefully won't
Speaker 1: rupture those cell walls, and thus the food will hold
Speaker 1: up a lot better. Bird's Eye worked out both of
Speaker 1: these issues and launched the Bird's Eye Frosted Food Company
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty with eighteen types of fish, other meats,
Speaker 1: fruits like raspberries, and vegetables like spinach. It wasn't an
Speaker 1: immediate success, but partially because canned goods were already so popular,
Speaker 1: and partially because lots of stores and homes didn't have
Speaker 1: mechanical refrigerators. World War II helped the American War Production
Speaker 1: Board enacted restrictions on metals like ten for use in
Speaker 1: the war effort. Cans were made of tin, and so
Speaker 1: buying canned goods at grocery stores cost more ration points
Speaker 1: than other foods. Besides that, lots of canned food production
Speaker 1: lines had been turned to making rations for armed forces overseas,
Speaker 1: so back at home, grocers started stocking frozen foods, sometimes
Speaker 1: in leased refrigerators. After the war, sales of home refrigerators
Speaker 1: picked up two Meanwhile, inventors had already started creating frozen meals.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty four, a company had started producing the
Speaker 1: line of complete meals frozen on individual resin coated paper
Speaker 1: trays that they called strato plates, originally for the Navy
Speaker 1: and then later for the commercial airline AM. The first
Speaker 1: frozen meals hit the consumer market in nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 1: when a Pittsburgh area company began selling fridge dinners on
Speaker 1: aluminum trays. However, it was Swanson's massive nineteen fifty four
Speaker 1: advertising campaign that sealed the deal on frozen meals for consumers.
Speaker 1: Plus the rise of a technically unrelated device, the television,
Speaker 1: After World War II, television experienced wild growth. It went
Speaker 1: from being something a few thousand people had in their
Speaker 1: homes in the nineteen forties to something over half the
Speaker 1: population had by nineteen fifty five. Swanson called their new
Speaker 1: frozen meal a TV dinner to ride the exploding wave
Speaker 1: of popularity. The story goes that Swanson executive Jerry Thomas
Speaker 1: got the idea to enter the frozen dinner foray after
Speaker 1: having been served one on a flight in nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 1: The company was simultaneously trying to solve a problem they
Speaker 1: had with Thanksgiving turkey leftovers. Not just a few tupperware
Speaker 1: containers worth either, but we're talking about two hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty tons of turkey. Thomas suggested that the Swanson brothers
Speaker 1: freeze the surplus, and two years later they had frozen
Speaker 1: dinners on their local market around Omaha, Nebraska. They got
Speaker 1: the idea to tie the concept in with watching television
Speaker 1: and even shaped the tray a bit like a TV set.
Speaker 1: They sold ten million meals their first year after taking
Speaker 1: their ad campaign national, including a Thanksgiving tray featuring turkey,
Speaker 1: corn bread, stuffing, peas, and sweet potatoes. Over the years,
Speaker 1: America's frozen foods have continued to develop two meet our wants.
Speaker 1: More menu options were added, including favorites like fish sticks
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty three, pizza rolls in nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: and frozen breakfasts like pancakes and sausages in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: A glance into the freezers at your local supermarket is
Speaker 1: all you need to know that today's frozen foods are
Speaker 1: distant comes to the TV dinners of the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: There are all kinds of single microwavable plates, bags, with
Speaker 1: complete meals for a skillet or baking dish, and party
Speaker 1: sized platters. You can find everything from breakfast sandwiches to
Speaker 1: butternut squash ravioli, lemon grass coconut chicken, to lemon merang
Speaker 1: pie and samosa's to spiral fries, plus classics like meat
Speaker 1: loaf and mashed potatoes and beef stroganof meals, and you know,
Speaker 1: an entire wall of frozen pizzas. The first frozen pizza
Speaker 1: debuted early on in nineteen forty nine. The industry's expansion
Speaker 1: into different foods catering to different tastes and health concerns
Speaker 1: like low sodium, gluten free, and vegan options really paid
Speaker 1: off during the first couple years of the COVID nineteen pandemic.
Speaker 1: American consumers stuck at home purchased record high numbers of
Speaker 1: frozen foods in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. We've
Speaker 1: backed off a bit since then, but the money that
Speaker 1: we've spent on frozen foods has continued to rise due
Speaker 1: to inflation and corporate earnings policies. It's estimated that the
Speaker 1: frozen food industry in the US will top eighty billion
Speaker 1: dollars in sales this year twenty twenty four, which means
Speaker 1: it's just about quadrupled in the last twenty years, not
Speaker 1: shabby for an industry that's been around for a little
Speaker 1: under a century. By the way, the quick freezing process
Speaker 1: allows foods to retain not just their texture, but also
Speaker 1: a lot of the vitamins, minerals, and other good stuff
Speaker 1: that they tend to lose during the canning process, so
Speaker 1: frozen fruit, vegetables, and proteins are as healthy as fresh
Speaker 1: and a better nutritional choice than canned. However, a lot
Speaker 1: of prepared frozen meals do have a bunch of salt, sugar,
Speaker 1: and or fat added, so watch out for that if
Speaker 1: that's something you want or need to watch out for.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is based on the article history of TV Dinners.
Speaker 1: Stuff works dot Com written by Maria Tremarky. Brain Stuff
Speaker 1: is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang.
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